Siete de Abril

A group of six alumnae from the University of Mary Washington traveled to El Progreso for a week to continue their support of SHH and survey the projects that are underway. Five of the six were on the first trip to Nuestras Pequeñas Rosas in 2004 and all seven were participants in SHH while students at UMW. During the week they visited the nutrition center and Copprome orphanage, worked at La Villa Soleada, visited the Siete de Abril community and accompanied Cosmo Fujiyama as she presented the land deed for the Por Venir School. "I am so thankful to have had this week here and I feel reinvigorated to keep supporting SHH and to find even more ways to contribute. It’s remarkable how much has happened in the months since Shin and Cosmo moved here." --Kelly Ryan '06

Fredericksburg, Virginia - A team of seven UMW students and their professor recently spent a week in Honduras conducting extensive interviews with more than 50 families suffering from indoor air pollution from wood-burning stoves--the fourth-leading cause of death for children under 5 in developing countries. Indoor air pollution has similar affects as smoking during pregnancy; it's as if children are smokers at birth.

Next up for the students: raising enough money to provide every home in the Honduran refugee village of Siete de Abril with improved cookstoves. The group also plans to establish a program for monitoring air quality in the homes after the new stoves are installed.  read more »

Over 125 students participated in service learning trips to El Progreso, Honduras between December 15, 2007 and January 13, 2008. In addition to several graduate students, alumni, and working professionals, volunteers represented 13 different colleges: the University of Mary Washington, the College of William and Mary, the University of Virginia, Georgetown University, Virginia Tech, the College of Westminster, the University of Richmond, Boston College, Barnard College, Hollins University, the University of Massachusetts, Western Illinois University, and Rutgers University. Volunteers spent between one and four weeks in the country.  read more »

Approximately 15 volunteers celebrated the Christmas season with the children of Copprome Orphanage and the community of Siete de Abril. Winter service trip volunteers brought over 125 suitcases of donations, providing presents that made Christmas possible for nearly 300 children. “Without these donations, these kids wouldn’t have food or gifts,” says Shin Fujiyama, “We saw a lot of smiles this year.”

On Christmas, volunteers brought the children of Copprome to a local mall to watch a movie, and were then treated to dance performances by all the children at cooprome's holiday party that evening.

On December 17, 2007, over one hundred villagers and SHH volunteers gathered to break ground on a major housing project that will benefit families from the impoverished village of Siete de Abril. Villa Soleada (Sunshine Village), named after Doris Buffet's Sunshine Lady Foundation, came into being after a joint decision by the community of Siete and the SHH Board of Directors in early November, which voted together to move the village rather than continue to contest ownership of the land Siete de Abril currently occupies.  read more »

On Sunday, October 27, Students Helping Honduras took a large step forward in its effort to provide more than seventy homes to the villagers at Siete de Abril in El Progreso, Honduras.

For the past several months, SHH has been working hard with Honduran lawyers and government officials to obtain land titles for the families living at Siete de Abril. Although nearly half of the land in Honduras is currently untitled, SHH felt very strongly that this was a critical precursor to any building project—for which security and sustainability are primary goals. Ultimately, this process was complicated by the villagers’ uncertain right of ownership, a fact disputed by several external parties. The resulting legal processes to obtain village ownership of this land may have taken between one and five years to realize, if possible at all.  read more »

The college world is a uniquely preparatory environment that rarely affords students the opportunity to apply their work in the classroom to real world change. Of course, this is a principal divide that SHH is consistently working to bridge. This Fall, the University of Mary Washington and SHH have partnered to create an independent study course in Economics called Doing Development. The class, which includes seven students taught by Dr. Shawn Humphrey, is focusing upon the problem of indoor-air-pollution, which the World Health Organization identifies as the cause of premature death for nearly 2.5 million people annually. For those individuals at Siete de Abril who are reliant on wood-burning cooking mechanisms, indoor-air-pollution may be linked to lung cancer, emphysema, and asthma.  read more »

How many college students does it take to build a home? During SHH’s most recent trip to El Progreso this August, group members found out first hand. The house, located in a small community called Las Brisas, only a couple of minutes from Copprome, was built in the names of the five children of widower Don Chepe. Gerson, Juan, Alejandro, Luis, and Wendy have lived at Copprome since their mother's death from illness.

The 17’ x 25’ home consists of 3 rooms: a living room, one room for the boys to share, and, at Don Chepe's insistence, one room just for Wendy. SHH members, alongside Don Chepe himself, a small team of masons, and with much help from neighbors, dug trenches, cut rebar, mixed cement and mortar, and laid cinder blocks.  read more »

The August 2007 trip took the first major preparatory step towards the work soon to start in Siete de Abril. The twelve group members from Mary Washington, William and Mary, Hollins, and UVA constructed a house for Don Chepe Perreira, in the name of his five children –all currently living at Copprome– to serve as prototype for the 75 homes to be built in the village. The group also met with the mayor of El Progreso regarding the ongoing petition to receive the land occupied by the village in donation from the city. Construction in Siete de Abril is now projected to begin in October.  read more »

The number one mistake non-profit organizations make is failing to listen closely to the people they are trying to help. This is something SHH is trying to change. Over the course of two weeks in July 2007, SHH completed a socioeconomic survey of seventy-one families at the impoverished village of Siete de Abril. The goal was to gain a better understanding of the economic and social challenges that these individuals face on a day-to-day basis. The survey has resulted in more than 1,200 pages of information on topics such as village education, employment, skills, income, health, and safety. More importantly, SHH now knows more than ever about what village members think about their current circumstances and how they feel our organization might be able to help.  read more »